Collection:
Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber was born and raised in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. In her early years, she was exposed to a wide variety tools and materials. Her grandmother was a drapery maker and an oil painter. Weber spent many hours at her grandmothers house, fascinated by the reams of material and fringe that were assembled together on large sewing machines and canvas-covered tables. Her grandmother let her paint with oils and Weber learn about the process and chemicals involved in painting. At home, Weber watched her parents renovate a building that had been used as a stagecoach station in the 1800's. She witnessed walls come down and go up, she saw tools in action, and was not intimidated by the building process. She became comfortable with saws and drills, and learned how to fix things. She learned to see materials in creative ways, such as using left-over drywall as sidewalk chalk.

During her school years, Weber's love for the creative process continued to grow. Weber knew by the time she was in grade school that she wanted to be an artist when she grew up. She took advantage of any artistic opportunity that came her way, and sold her first painting to her high school. In college, Weber had the opportunity to fully immerse herself in art. She studied the works of various artists, including Mark Rothko, Eva Hesse, and the classic Greek sculptors. It was in college that her distinctive style emerged, using a combination of a painted canvas, fabric, and binding mediums. She graduated with a B.A. in Art History and the Visual Arts from Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Weber's sculptural paintings reference the orderliness of nature, and the outside forces that warp and pull on that organization. She paints an image on canvas, representing a scene from nature or human nature. She pieces together fabric swatches to reference the painted image. The straight lines of the material represent the order and science of the basic building blocks of nature. By sealing the fabric to the canvas with an acrylic medium, the straight lines twist and pull the swatches into more organic shapes. This depicts the deviation from the original plan by outside forces such as entropy, other people, decay, and time. In the process, the fabric becomes translucent and the image beneath can be seen in places. Weber feels that this struggle between order and the chaos of outside forces creates beautiful outcomes. She states, "fabric surrounds us and we feel a personal connection to cloth. We are constantly embraced by material, and we naturally want to touch it. This natural desire to touch extends to my paintings. The first thing people want to do when they see my artwork is feel it, and I encourage viewers to do just that."